Greatest moments of computer history are speeding up

Omega Point expected around 2040

Schmidhuber's law
states that the delays
between successive radical
breakthroughs
in computer science
decrease exponentially: each new one
comes roughly twice as fast as the previous one.
Compare the original article
arxiv:cs.AI/0302012
or the relevant page of the local copy.
Also compare
the concept of an approaching historic singularity
(Stanislaw Ulam, 1958), which apparently inspired Vernor Vinge's
writings on the
technological singularity.

Do not confuse this with
Moore's law (1965), which roughly states that each year or so
we can pack twice as many transistors on a microchip, such
that computers are getting roughly twice as fast by cost.
Also do not confuse Schmidhuber's law with
Schmidhuber's
hypothesis (1997), which essentially
says that the universe is just a by-product of
a simple computational process that computes all computable
universe histories, not just ours.

The law has been holding for almost four centuries.
Surprisingly the greatest breakthroughs even match a century-based logarithmic
scale, as illustrated by the following table.

1623

Wilhelm Schickard
(1623)
starts the computing age
by building the first calculators
(no evidence for claims that Leonardo da Vinci
built such machines even earlier)

~2
centuries
later

1834-1840: Charles Babbage (UK) envisions
programmable computers.
This is a major conceptual breakthrough - all previous
machines were `hardwired.'
Babbage cannot get his decimal designs to work though.

A bit earlier,
Kurt Goedel
(Austria) publishes
his fundamental work on universal formal
languages and the limits of proof and computation (1931). His results
are reformulated by Alan Turing
(UK, 1936) who later helps to break the Nazi code (1943).

1/2
century
later

The next 50 years bring
advances in theory and switching speed: relays are replaced by
tubes by transistors by chips. Arguably rather predictable
progress!
But in 1990
UK's Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Switzerland) shakes up everything again by
creating the
WWW.

1/4
century
later

?

Extrapolating the trend, optimists should expect another radical
change by 2015, which happens to coincide with the date when the fastest
computers will match brains in terms of raw computing power, according to
frequent estimates.

.
.
.

?

Omega
point
(~2040)

?

The remaining series of faster and faster additional
revolutions should culminate in an "Omega point"
(Teilhard de Chardin, 1916)
expected around 2030-2040.

Zuse was listed among the 20th century's
30 most important persons in Peter's synchronoptic atlas of world history.
Goedel, Turing, and Berners-Lee at least made it into TIME magazine's list of
the century's 20 most influential scientists, together with
this man.